It takes courage, extraordinary courage, for a US woman politician to confront head-on an opponent from the nation’s mainstream out to smear and bully her into submission. Tulsi Gabbard, the sole Hindu on Capitol Hill is one such person. She is not of Indian descent. She is from Hawaii and represents the state in the House. Her Hindu faith is rooted in the Vaishnav tradition in which peace and non-violence is a central life-giving force.
America is today governed by indistinct rules of law and a parallel crime syndicate of gun lobbies, big business, and an all powerful military industrial complex whose predatory instincts and designs were the subjects of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s valedictory 1960 address to the nation.
Tulsi Gabbard belongs to the Democratic Party, now deeply scarred by scandal, in-fighting and varied villainies in which Hillary Clinton – President Trump’s ‘crooked Hillary,’ has a leading role. A former Secretary of State in the Obama administration, she lost the presidential election of 2016 and remains stubbornly unwilling to accept the result. When in trouble blame the Russians.
The narrative of America’s Manifest Destiny is shop soiled and frayed. Its pretence that is an upholder and stakeholder in human rights and the rule of law across the world has long been exposed as a cruel joke.
Its wars of intervention have reduced much of the Greater Middle East and North Africa to a howling desolation. The American media projects its truths through an appropriately designed prism of calibrated and outright falsehood. It is Noam Chomsky’s Requiem for the American Dream. Professor Chomsky (for those unfamiliar with his name) is one of America’s greatest minds, an unwavering voice of noble dissent.
Hillary Clinton has accused Tulsi Gabbard of being a Russian agent. Tulsi Gabbard’s crimes were her visit to Syria and her meeting with the reviled President Assad, all done with an eye to acquire firsthand knowledge of the situation on the ground - her entitlement as a US legislator. Over and above this, Congresswoman Gabbard has called for arms control talks between the United States and Russia, surely an urgent priority as the capricious, yoyo-ing President Trump has jettisoned all previous arms limitation accords going back decades to the Soviet era.
President is much given to begin an address to the nation and to the international community, not with the Lord’s Prayer, but with invocations to his country’s military strength and purpose, coupled with dwarfing military budgets. The search for elusive security has deepened national neurosis a monting to paranoia. The search for enemies has become a Kafkaesque experience.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms includes the magical sentence - ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ Roosevelt has long disappeared into the shadows. The new musclemen and women believe that brandishing weapons and uttering threats will have the desired effect. Not so.
This ritual exercise in flaunting military power hasn’t yielded the expected dividends, least of all in a cringing Russia. The music hall hysteria on Russia and Russian interference in US domestic politics is not without irony coming from a country whose addiction to regime change in targeted countries deemed enemies has long been an opiate for the masses. President Putin’s two videos of Russia’s latest weaponry nuclear and conventional have made their point emphatically in Syria. His outreach into hallowed US spheres of influence in the Middle East and Africa are facts of life to which the world will grow accustomed in the fullness of time. The descent of Russia’s latest ‘White Swan’ jumbo transport and bomber aircraft, able also to circumnavigate the globe without refuelling, touched down on South African soil its, message clear. Game on.
Meanwhile asymmetric warfare in Afghanistan has bogged down the US in the longest war in its history. Hallucinatory delusions of grandeur in the White House, Capitol Hill and the country’s loquaciously xenophobic media show few signs of abating. A US-dominated world order is dead in the water; the multi-polar substitute is in the making, irrespective of the jet stream twaddle to the contrary emanating from the US, EU and NATO.
Tulsi Gabbard is largely a lone voice of sanity, but it is a feisty, no-nonsense voice. She dismissed the gaseous insults of Hillary Clinton as those of a corrupt ‘warmonger’. Conscience and courage are a light unto the nations, its glow an inspiration to those given to dream of a better, saner world.
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